/ blogFOSSCOMM 2023 Heraklion — How PostgreSQL can help you enforce best practices
So here's a very delayed blog post! Back in late October 2023, I visited the FOSSCOMM conference in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, organised for the 15th year running (!) by the Greek open source community. As a community conference, there is a very heavy student presence, a really broad range of topics, and geeky stuff, and that is just awesome. The DIY spirit, volunteering and camaraderie brings out the best in people and makes it all enjoyable for attendees. This conference accepts talks in either Greek or English and the level of talks was quite high. There were talks focused on beginners, community issues, but also very technical in-depth dives into stuff you've never thought about.
After giving this talk, titled "How PostgreSQL helps you enforce best practices" at PGConf.NYC I thought it might be interesting to the FOSSCOMM crowd, and it was indeed accepted for the conference. I was happy to find out it would be recorded — but unfortunately, for a couple of months, it looked like the footage had been lost.
One day last week, I was pleasantly surprised when one of the organisers got in touch and said they could give me access to some of the raw video files they had recovered from the talk recording! So I spent a couple of hours editing those, and what follows below is the best that I could do with them (so my apologies if it isn't TED talk quality).
The basic idea is that many systems have commonalities that lend themselves to similar best practices for administration and maintenance. Database systems in particular are complex and have many correctness, performance, and security considerations. This talk discusses PostgreSQL best practices, and how these translate to best practices in general - it is very dense and that is why I've decided instead of rushing through the content, to expand on it and write a BOOK (but that's another blog post!)
Topics discussed:
- Using the proper data types
- Controlling parallelization & transaction rate
- How locking affects performance
- Home-brewing Distributed Systems (don't)
- Choosing the right encoding
- Configuring for production usage
- Tracking resource usage
- Security good practices
- High Availability good practices
- The importance of upgrading & how to do it right
Video on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=xg048-n_wr4
Link to talk slides: vyruss.org/computing/slides/fosscomm2023_how_postgresql_can_help_you_enforce_best_practices.pdf
